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I'd invest in Barclays before banking with it

Banks were always going to emerge from the credit crisis with customers right where they wanted them - and last week we started to see why.

Barclays announced last Thursday that profits before tax in the first three months of this year rose a healthy 15% to £1.37 billion.

Jonathan Pierce of Credit Suisse, one of the City's foremost banking analysts, thought it was "by far and away the best quarter Barclays has ever had" and forecast that profits for the full year could be as high as £5 billion.

This is pretty astonishing when you consider banks are supposed to be on their knees. No wonder the share price has almost trebled since February.

Admittedly, the numbers coming out of the UK business didn't look quite so good. Income was down while defaults on personal loans and overdrafts were up.